Destination loosens
The weave of the familiar
And distances the near.
A man begins his absence
From a loved one, easing
Away as if he peeled
Gently a cling-close dressing
From a wound unhealed –
A wound as yet scarce felt.
From a loved home easing
While he is still there,
For all its sheltering grief
He finds in his breast the hare
Roused from its form, the leaf
That in late fall writhes to be off.
While he is here, still here,
His going will slide between
Him and all he would stay for,
Misting each homely scene;
The ill-wished hours hang over
His head, without bloom or flavour.
Between staying and going
Opens the little death,
Shadowed, unformed, uncanny
And makes the real a wraith.
Oh, travelling starts many
Days before the journey.
Fishguard to Rosslare
From all my childhood voyages back to Ireland
Only two things remembered: gulls afloat
Off Fishguard quay, littering a patch of radiance
Shed by the midnight boat.
And at dawn a low, dun coast shaping to meet me,
An oyster sky opening above Rosslare …
I rub the sleep from my eyes. Gulls pace the moving
Mast-head. We’re almost there.
Gulls white as a dream on the pitch of Fishguard harbour,
Paper cut-outs, birds on a lacquered screen;
The low coastline and the pearl sky of Ireland;
A long sleep in between.
A sleep between two waking dreams – the haven,
The landfall – is how it appears now. The child’s eye,
Unpuzzled, saw plain facts: I catch a glint from
The darkness they’re haunted by.
The Hieroglyph
Now limbs awaken stiff
And wit goes limp, I view
Closer but no clearer
Death’s riddling hieroglyph –
The sole, the common grave.
Reason deciphers there
An order to dissolve
Body and mind: religion
Reads in it a dear-
Bought visa to elsewhere.
The shadows lengthen. I
Could envy a brute beast
Who, till the hour comes round,
Enjoys an eternal sty,
Ignorant he must die.
Indeed I would not be one
Who counts the hours to death,
Hoarding each last gold drip
Of an exhausted sun,
Or wishing his day were done.
Treasure and snake entwined
Image love’s transience,
The gold unvalued if
No guardian sting the mind
To think it must be resigned.
Meanwhile, let me preserve
A discipline of living
Under the law of death,
Honouring still the nerve
And need of mortal love.
Seven Steps in Love
I
‘I dreamed love was an angel,
But her finger-tip is laid
Like the peine forte et dure upon
My breast, and I’m afraid.
‘I am afraid, afraid.
The letter-box rattles a threat,
Disaster seeps through my window-frame,
Takes me by the throat.’
Sure, earth changes colour
And the heart’s oppressed –
It’s the storm of rebirth you fear – when she
Points a man at your breast.
Oh she’s the wheedling goddess
With a strap behind her back:
She’ll hand you a bunch of roses
And lay you on the rack;
Stretch you upon your lover’s absence,
Wring you dry of tears,
Brainwash you into believing
You’re dead till he climbs the stairs.
And if at last for each other
Body and mind you strip,
She’ll pin her undated farewell note
Onto the pillow-slip.
Give in, give in, fond lovers,
And she’ll starve you with wanting more:
Refrain, refrain, and she crams you
With yeasty dreams to the craw.
She has no heart for mercy,
Treats honour as a clown:
But when her naked eye selects you,
Better lie down, lie down.
II
Where autumn and high midsummer meet, there’s a touch
Of desperation – rose-beds ready to flare
Their last, holidays nearly over, a premonition
On bonfire and frost in the air.
Veterans of the game, they watched the agents
Of that great power, disguised as usual
In quite transparent innocence, dawdle across the frontier
Disarming and casual
As tourists. A man force deployed from both.
Silently the soft perimeters fell.
Then key positions, yielding at a collusive whisper,
Betrayed the citadel.
Each occupied by the other now, they exchange
Rations, arms, campaign-talk: nothing matters
But more and more to surrender. See the vanquished crown with
Olive those sweet invaders.
The everyday opens into a paradise garden.
Gold roses spring through pavements, and a spray
Of freesia freshens the dusty room. For a while, winter
Seems two life-times away.
III
She is the dark Unknown
Which makes him an explorer. Gales and spices
For him alone
Breathe in her singing words, her silences
Are silver mines, her frown
Ripples with lynx and cobra … It is the strangeness
That lures him on.
Wisdom upon her tongue, but in her veins
Terrified and exulting
Nymph-breasts like whitebeam flash, animals panic –
All’s running, melting
Before the tall flame’s stride. She fears there’ll be
No escape now, no halting,
Yet dreams of forest fires tamed to a hearth.
IV
In love, the animal speaks
With an angel’s tongue,
Crying his pure Magnificat
Over sweat, wounds, dung.
Erect and single-minded,
Cunning of enterprise,
The brute becomes a poet in
Flatteries and lies.
That prince and scourge of the blood
Will claim he can do no wrong,
Coin his own image of truth, and whip
The half-hearted along;
Rubicund, smiles to think
That Honesty is the name
For what looks like the ghost of a flower,
A flimsy spectrogram.
V
When eyes go dark and bodies
Nakedly press home,
Let all else be dumb,
Louder sing the sensual glee,
Louder the nerves thrum.
Stand off, you cowled observer
Who eye love’s act askance.
Shameless of tongue, of hands,
Body shall make the awkward soul
Jump to its commands.
Only the wry soul answers
In ridicule or disgust.
Praise, man, that flurry of dust –
Your rutting animal: moon-gold woman,
Be candid of your lust.
Now the respectful lover,
Fleshed upon his prey
/> Brute hunger to allay,
Is one with roughneck ancestors
Millenniums away.
Now she is the tumid
Ocean he rides and reaps:
Wave upon wave she leaps
Against him; then her dissolute power
Gulps him down, and sleeps.
When eyes go dark and bodies
One to another fly,
Let not the soul decry
What wisdom’s born from dialogues
Of wanton breast and thigh.
VI
Stretched at their feet, one morning after love,
The holy lough renews without a flaw
What the storm had erased – a shadow-shore
Of rocks, grass, bracken: russet, emerald, mauve.
Dream-colours wake in their untroubled sense,
Golds of the fall – grain, harvest moon, wild bees,
And the leaves reddening for long goodbyes:
The lake’s hushed in the silver of their trance.
A violet mountain, steep beyond the glen,
Lets down like tumbling hair a cataract
Which goes to sleep in waters that reflect
Its passionate leaping as a still, white line.
No stir of wind or wing to flaw the calm,
These lovers, flesh appeased, would consummate
A dearer union, for their hearts dilate
With images of all they could become.
VII
Not in the fleshed and wanton grove,
The goddess-haunted air,
The sacred calm when bodies move
Apart which groaned and cleaved,
Is tenderness conceived,
The lover taught his care.
A woman, beautiful as a myth,
Turns mortal-eyed and plain,
Demanding reassurance with
Quenched grace, domestic tongue –
Then is the trap sprung,
The treadmill starts again.
The Fox
‘Look, it’s a fox!’ – their two hearts spoke
Together. A fortunate day
That was when they saw him, a russet spark
Blown from the wood’s long-smouldering dark
On to the woodside way.
There, on the ride, a dog fox paused.
Around him the shadows lay
Attentive suddenly, masked and poised;
And the watchers found themselves enclosed
In a circuit stronger than they.
He stood for some mystery only shared
By creatures of fire and clay.
They watched him stand with the masterless air
Of one who had the best right to be there –
Let others go or stay;
Then, with a flick of his long brush, sign
The moment and whisk it away.
Time flowed back, and the two walked on
Down the valley. They felt they were given a sign –
But of what, they could hardly say.
The Romantics
Those two walked up a chancel of beech trees
Columnar grey, and overhead there fluttered
Fan-vaultings of green leaf. She moved with chastity’s
Dancing step, he dull with love unuttered.
She is all Artemis, he thought, and I
Her leashed and clownish hound. But he miscalled her
Who dreamily saw at the ride’s far end an O of sky
Like love-in-a-mist, herself pure white, an altar.
The vows exchanged, their love pronounced eternal,
They learn how altar stands for sacrifice.
All changes – beechwood chancel into a cramped tunnel;
Huntress to victim; hound, throwing off disguise,
To faithless hero. Soon he’ll take the knife and start
To carve his way out of her loving heart.
Stephanotis
Pouring an essence of stephanotis
Into his bath till the panelled, carpeted room
Breathed like a paradise fit for sweltering houris,
He lapsed through scent and steam
To another bathroom, shires and years away –
A makeshift one tacked on to
The end of a cottage, it smelt of rusting pipes,
Damp plaster. In that lean-to
One night she sprinkled the stephanotis
He’d given her – a few drops of delicate living
Tasted by two still young enough to need
No luxury but their loving.
They are long parted, and their essence gone.
Yet even now he can smell,
Infused with the paradise scent, that breath of rusty
Water and sweating wall.
The Dam
It mounted up behind his cowardice
And self-regard. Fearing she would expose
His leper tissue of half-truths and lies
When, hurt, she probed at him, he tried to gloze
That fear as patience with her sick mistrust
Of him: he could not answer her appeal,
Nor recognize how his was the accursed
Patience of flesh that can no longer feel …
Love had once mounted up behind his fear
Of being exposed in love’s whole helplessness,
And broke it down, and carried him to her
On the pure, toppling rage for nakedness …
A spate of her reproaches. The dam broke.
In deluging anger his self-hatred spoke.
An Operation
The knife, whose freezing shadow had unsteeled
His loved one’s heart, moved in at last to shear
Impassive flesh: she was no longer there –
Only a surface to be botched or healed.
While this went through, he felt the critical blade
Cut from his own heart all the encrustation
Of years and usage: bleeding with compassion,
He found his love laid bare, a love new-made.
OTHERS
Who Goes Home?
(WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL, 1874–1965)
I
So the great politician
Goes home; and we consign
To history his craft of politics
Ennobled by a vision
That saw the grand design,
The vaulting arch sprung from the clay-bound bricks.
Soldier, historian,
Orator, artist – he
Adorned the present and awoke the past:
Now ended his long span,
A one-man ministry
Of all the talents has resigned at last.
We knew him in debate
Provocative or prophetic,
A Puck one day, the next a Prospero.
We saw him by defeat
Unsoured – the energetic
Come-back, the magnanimity all through.
Here was a man in whom
Great issues brought to light
Genius to grapple them. On a poised hour
Danger drew steel and gloom
Struck fire from him: the tide
Of battle charged his impetuous mind with power.
So he becomes a myth,
A dynast of our day
Standing for all time at the storm’s rough centre
Where he, a monolith
Of purpose grim and gay,
Flung in the waves’ teeth the rock’s no-surrender.
II
That myth we cherish now the man is dead.
But, living, what was he to most? – a trite
Cartoon of grit and wit?
A bulldog mouth, a tortoise thrust of the head,
A cigar, a genial snarl? Go deeper. See
The versatility
Rare in this narrowing age. His soldier’s nerve,
Painter’s colour-struck eye, orator’s flair
For passion, writer’s care
In the ménage
of thought – all went to serve
His need that life be a momentous tale
Heroic in scope and scale.
The route was difficult, and the peak remote.
A dunce at school, an uppish subaltern –
How few could there discern
One who would make the history he wrote,
Or see the young fox-haired firebrand of debate
Steadying a shaken State.
Aristocratic temper, in an age
Restive against the uncommon, rides for a fall.
Wilful, mercurial,
Impatient of the reckonings that engage
Small minds, unseated often, still he rose
Above his falls and foes.
Great Marlborough in his heart, upon his tongue
Gibbon’s long thunders, always he foreknew
High destiny, and grew
Into his legend slowly; then among
Titanic storms claimed an immortal part –
Gave Britain tongue and heart.
III
Who goes home? goes home?
By river, street and dome
The long lamenting call echoes on, travels on
From London, further, further,
Across all lands. The Mother
Of Parliaments is grieving for her great, dead son.
A soaring spirit vaults
The failures and the faults
Of the clay that it worked in, the will it clarified.
Though a voice is taken hence,
Its reverberant eloquence
Rings on into the ages, rings out on freedom’s side.
Remember at his passing
That finest hour – the bracing
Of nerve, the hearts lifting, the challenge to dismay,
When a nation took cheer
From the vision he held dear
Of uplands shining out beyond a sombre day.
But also call to mind
With what grace he resigned
The habit of power, the pulse of action. Character stood
The test of letting go
What had sustained it; so
Complete Poems Page 45
